This weekend I return to Hartford to bring my exhibition at the Farmington Valley Arts Centre to a close. I have agreed to give a brief talk about my journey as an artist to a small gathering that includes my sister and her daughter. At the end of a thoroughly enjoyable session, including tea and cookies, we’re invited to visit the studio of one of the artists at the Centre.
In an airy room with large canvases in various stages of progress, Maurice Casas, the artist, talks about wanting to go beyond two-dimensional art, to address the social chaos of the world we live in through installations and performance art. Working in charcoal he creates photorealistic images in stark black and white, of powerful bodies, bound and shackled. He coaxes a range of textures from the medium — veins standing out against straining muscles, silken strands of hair, smooth white marble, coarse rope and a snake’s graceful coils — but assures us with a shrug that it’s really not that difficult.
I smile and shake my head: I’ve never been able to use charcoal and to me, what he has achieved looks like straightforward sorcery! Later, I am reminded of this conversation during a film called Loving Vincent that we go to see, my sister, niece and I, about the 19th-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, it is the world’s first animation film created entirely in the form of oil paintings. I’d heard about the project a couple of years ago and seen a few still images, so it was a real treat to watch the finished work.
The story is told in the form of a whodunnit, as we follow the efforts of Armand Roulin to deliver a letter written by the artist six weeks before his untimely death, at the age of 37. The film is very well made. The artwork closely approximates the thick brush-strokes and vibrant colours characteristic of van Gogh’s style, while tracing the details of the artist’s final days and weeks. We meet his friends and his confidants, and visit the room in which he died, all the while being told of his acute loneliness and isolation.
The artwork is amazing. The filmmakers use van Gogh’s own paintings as the foundation for the scenes and characters that appear in the film. Actors flesh out the roles, then animators convert the live action footage into paintings – 65,000 frames, created by a team of 115 artists – in order to achieve the effect of paintings that move and speak. The nagging question is: did he commit suicide? This film presents compelling evidence that he did not.
He began painting in his late twenties, producing 800 paintings in eight years, of which he sold only one. Yet his heart continues to beat within the frames of his paintings. I am reminded of Maurice’s canvases and the angry power of his images. Entirely different styles, entirely different concepts, but lit by the same bright energy.
Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column